The First Steps
by I Escaped the Loop
Summary: Ash was never a kid that seemed to take the easy path, whether by choice or unintentionally. And the fact that he befriended and abandoned Drowzee before he even became an official trainer didn't exactly help things...
1. Chapter 1

The First Steps

Summary: Ash was never a kid that seemed to take the easy path, whether it was by choice or unintentionally. And the fact that he manages to befriend an abandoned Drowzee before he even became an official trainer doesn't exactly help things…

Chapter 1: A Friend in Need is a Friend indeed

 **Hello People! This is my attempt at the Different Starter plot and I hope that this won't be too similar to every other fanfiction in this category. I am planning to give Ash a lot of pokemon that I don't see used a lot in fanfictions like these, with some exceptions. Some of Ash's pokemon from the original anime will show up but he won't capture all of them by a longshot. Sorry pikachu-fans but I want to focus on other pokemon that don't get the spotlight that often in this kind of fanfictions. Also, there will be no slash or any romance in this fic because not only is Ash too young to start to think about these things but I am also not that good at writing a believable romance. Please enjoy the read and leave a review!**

The forest that surrounded Pallet Town was usually a very peaceful place, many kind of pokemon called this area their home and the large trees made the place look very serene and calm. However, this soothing and calming atmosphere was interrupted by the sobs of a crying young boy. This boy was Ash Ketchum and he was only 7 years old, he was running through the forest because another boy that had once been his friend had picked on him and told him that he was never going to be a pokemon-trainer and combined this with constantly giving him more and more degrading nicknames. The one-sided conversation had ended with Ash running out of Pallet Town and into the forest, not seeing clearly where he was going because of the tears blurring his vision. The nasty words was constantly echoing and increasing in volume inside Ash's head, all of these distractions caused Ash to trip on an up-sticking root and fall down a slope. He shakenly tried to stand up but a sharp pain in his left foot caused him to sit down again, it appeared that he had twisted his ankle in the fall. To pour even more salt on the woods, the dark clouds all of a sudden caused rain to fall. A dirty Ash covered in mud and now soaking wet managed to drag himself under a nearby tree, he pulled his knees closer to his chest and started to cry again. It seemed that the entire world was against Ash at that moment, at the very least as far as Ash was concerned.

POKEMON POV:

Drowzee watched in complete empathy as the brainless monkey he was supposed to call his trainer crushed the pokeball under his foot, when Drowzee had first been captured he hadn't been impressed with the human that was going to command him from now on but he was willing to give this human a chance.

His initial impression hadn't changed one bit since then, the boy was still an insufferable brat who had no idea about how to handle a pokemon of his caliber and only captured pokemon that he deemed to be powerful enough. He rarely trained his team at all, expecting their raw strength to win everything for him.

Drowzee prayed for the poor pokemon and hoped that someone would end their misery one way or another.

The reason he had been abandoned was because he hadn't evolved despite the fact that he technically should have a couple of years back, he could have evolved a long time ago if he had desired but he wasn't going to give this awful "trainer" the satisfaction. A little known fact was that psychic-types could control when they were going to evolve better than a majority of other types, the various professors theorized that this was because of the enourmous amount of control that a psychic-type needed to have over its powers in order to not destroy everything around it and therefore became a lot better at precisely channeling their aura to achieve their results. The aura also powered a pokemon's evolution, it was the sole reason the evolving pokemon was covered in a white glow during the process after all.

The trainer was snarling at him, he had just suffered a massive loss in the Kanto League and Drowzee could smugly admit that he was the reason why.

"You worthless piece of junk, you're supposed to be called a psychic-type?! You're barely able to defeat the weakest of opponents, you cost me my place in the top 16!"

Drowzee had held back a great deal during the initial battles and during the top 32 he even had the balls to fall asleep in the middle of the arena when he was the last available pokemon his former trainer had left.

"Now you're on your own and I sure hope that you get eaten, you ####-ing shithead."

The teen turned around and stomped off with steam blowing out of his ears, Drowzee couldn't be any happier. He was a long way from home but he was a crafty pokemon, he knew how to live in the wild and had no doubts that he would live good here. The mere fact that he was an experienced psychic-type would keep the few predators that lived here far away; there wasn't many pokemon that could match a fully grown Drowzee in this part of Kanto.

Drowzee slowly walked through the forest, eating a few berries as he went along. A drop of water landed on his snout and he looked up to see the dark clouds, no doubt it was going to rain soon. He was about to sit down when he heard someone crying, at first he thought it was the wind blowing through the leaves but the sounds didn't add up.

In fact, it sounded a lot like a human child crying and a pretty young one at that. His stomach dropped; despite his dislike for his trainer he didn't have anything against the human race as a whole. Especially human children were quite a delightful species when they were raised correctly, they were also incredibly fragile and a human child would last long in the wild.

He picked up the pace; he had to find the child and winds in weather like this could carry sounds a big distance away from the source. What if the child was injured? It wouldn't be able to fight back if a predator decided to strike and make the child its next meal. He rushed through the foliage, constantly probing the nearby area to pick up the child's brainwaves.

A sudden rush of sorrow and fear coming from the southeast made him turn and he pushed a few bushes apart to see a young boy sitting curled up against a tree with his knees against his chest. He sighed, at the very least the boy looked well enough though he suspected that the ankle was twisted given how swollen it was. He gently approached the young boy while generating a feeling of trust with his psychic power; he needed the boy to trust him so that he could get the child to safety. He gently picked up the kid and began to walk out of the forest, from what he could gleam from the boy's memories there was a human settlement nearby and after getting directions from a friendly Rattata it surely wouldn't take long.

A few minutes later, Drowzee felt a weight drop from his chest as he saw the houses of the human settlement. He ran up to the building with the windmill on the roof, he recognized it as the laboratory that most trainers' pokemon were sent when they weren't on the current team. No doubt there would be someone there that could help the poor child. Drowzee smiled, the boy was going to make it.

ASH POV

Ash had never been more scared in his life when the strange pokemon approached him, he had seen a lot of scary pokemon in Professor Oak's corral but he didn't recognize the pokemon that stood before him. He curled up into an even tighter ball, afraid that it was going to hurt him. Instead, the pokemon picked him up and began to give him a piggyback-ride out of the forest. He would have resisted more but deep inside he knew that he wouldn't have a chance to get away even if he tried. And there was something about the pokemon that made Ash trust it on a level perhaps even deeper than his own mother, she had begun to ignore him after his father had left them and Ash never felt like he could truly count on her the way any other child his age could. As a result he had never bothered to tell her about Gary's bullying, she wouldn't have listened either way. It was a strange yet warm feeling; for the first time since he was a toddler Ash felt completely safe.

NORMAL POV:

Professor Samuel Oak had seen a lot in his career, but it still surprised him when he responded to a knock on the door to see a Drowzee carrying a child on its back. His eyes turned grim when he recognized the boy and took in his condition.

"Oh dear, Ash was out there in the rain?"

The pokemon nodded and Samuel felt a migrain growing, Delia would throw a tantrum when she learned what Ash had been through. Though maybe it would be a good lesson for her, she hadn't been an especially good parent ever since her husband abandoned both her and Ash for the fame and glory that came with being a Pokemon Champion.

"Thank you for bringing him here, Drowzee. His mother has been very worried ever since she noticed that he didn't came home after school."

The pokemon nodded and the old professor half-expected it to leave since its task was complete but it didn't. To be fair it wasn't exactly hard to see why. Ash had refused to let go of Drowzee and had almost started crying when Samuel had tried to persuade Ash that he had to in order to him to see if the boy had any other injuries outside of his twisted ankle. Oak suspected that Ash had gotten attached to the pokemon, it had saved his life after all. He bent down to Drowzee's eye-level.

"Drowzee, I want to thank you yet again for bringing Ash back home. Who knows what could have happened to him out there? But I am currently facing a bit of a dilemma. I know that you are a wild pokemon and it really isn't my place to force you to stay here any longer than you already has. But Ash needs you to recover from this experience, I am pretty certain that you have noticed how close he has gotten to you already. Can you at the very least stay until he begins his pokemon-journey?"

The psychic pokemon thought for a moment, gazed at the boy he had rescued and then nodded. Samuel smiled warmly.

"Thank you. I am going to have to catch you to prevent any traveling trainer from doing it themselves, but I assure you that you are free to roam around as you please once the time we agreed on has passed."

Drowzee nodded again and gave Ash a gentle pat on the head before he was sucked into a pokeball. No one could ever have foreseen the consequences this pokemon's actions would have in the future...

 **And there you have it! Now, some small things you readers need to know. Because of my lack of gaming-consoles I have not played any of the games; therefore my knowledge of tiers, stats and which pokemon is technically stronger than the other is limited to Youtube and Bulbapedia. There will be no evolution by trade in this fic since it will be tideous to write a trade-and-trade-back-scene for every single pokemon that evolves through this method. This is also not going to be a godlike-Ash-story, just because he practically starts out with a psychic-type (which is also known as the most broken type in generation 1) it doesn't mean that he is going to waltz through every trainer that he encounters. He is going to loose sometimes, especially in the beginning when he is just starting out but will get better as the story progresses. This particular story is going to center on his Kanto-journey and there will be sequels when we reach the other regions.**

 ** _I Escaped The Loop_ and found the world of Pokemon. **


	2. Update: Going on Temporary Hiatus

As of the time that I write this, I have come to a somewhat sad conclusion.

If I am going to write a serious, multi-chapter story where everything ties together; I need to write a script beforehand.

Stories like Hogwarts Rejection Letters don't go into this category because the letters don't tie into each other but for the rest, I definitely need a script or else it is going to end up like it is now with several stories not having been updated for almost a year since it takes so long for me to write a single chapter.

I am going to warn you that several of my stories (like First Steps and Throne of Limestone) are going to go to the backburner until I can write together a script for them, trust me, it may take a while for them to keep going again but they will look a lot better when I actually know where I am going.

Until then, I have an almost finished base-draft of the first "season" of a new story that I am working on. It is coming together rather nicely and I can start to write the actual chapters once I have written a similar script for the rest of the "seasons" and a more detailed script for each chapter of the first one. It truly is like writing an actual book, with several rewrites and a lot of frustration when you realize that some things don't match up with the rest of the story or that some events should be in a different order.

As I have mentioned in my bio, my passion for some things comes in large spikes and valleys where I am really passionate about it and write tons of stories about it (by looking at some of the short story-snippets that I have written in the past I can pinpoint exactly what I liked at the time of writing it) and then my interest drops sharply and I become passionate about something else. I can't control these moods of mine and they are a big part of what makes writing these stories consistently really difficult. But if I have a script ready (or several for that matter) I don't forget all of my ideas that I had and can simply pick up right where I left off when I get in the mood write again.

Sorry for doing this but it is the only way for me to try and fix this mess that I have created by not paying attention to what I was doing.


End file.
